Title : J'amuse Filename : amuse.bsp Author : Dave Munroe Email Address : dmunroe@vcd.hp.com Date : February 15, 1999 Description : The beginnings of an amusement park Additional Credits to : id Software for Quake 2, The Action Quake team, The authors of Qoole, The authors of the many excellent tutorials on the Rust web site (www.gamedesign.net). ================================================================ * Play Information * Single Player : Yes, for learning the map and practicing techniques on how to do and get things. Cooperative : No Deathmatch 2-5 : Yes, but this map is too large for so few players. Deathmatch 6-12 : Yes, this is probably optimal. Deathmatch 13+ : Yes Action teamplay : Not designed for teamplay. Time will tell if this happens to be a good map for teamplay or if it's really awful. Difficulty Settings : No New Sounds : No New Graphics : No New Music : No Demos Replaced : No CD Track : No ================================================================ * Overview and Playing tips * Overview -------- This map is the beginning of an amusement park; it consists of three sections. The East section contains a monorail station, several hills, and a maze building. The North section contains a monorail tunnel and an air trampoline. The West section contains elevated glass walkways and two air towers. The monorail has three "cars" which can be ridden in. The monorail loops around the East section, enters and loops around the North section, and then returns to the station in the East section. The cars wait at the station for eight seconds before beginning their journey. The monorail passes through several tunnels in the hills. How to ride the monorail ------------------------ There is a technique that will let you ride the cars without getting your head lopped off or getting squished on the side of a tunnel; I have used this technique thousands of times (no, I am not exaggerating) without getting killed once. First, though, I will explain what doesn't work. - If you stand up in the monorail car, you will have to crouch at times to avoid getting your head lopped off when entering a tunnel or when the monorail passes under its own track. Having to remember to crouch is difficult during intense gameplay, so I don't recommend this technique. - If you stay crouched in the car, you'll be safe but you won't be able to see or shoot very well because of the rim of the car. Boring. - If you stay crouched on the rim, you will most likely get squished by the side of a tunnel when the car enters it. So... *--> - To best ride the car, first get inside and crouch down. Make sure you're somewhere in the center and away from the rim. Now, move towards the rim (I suggest facing either backwards or forwards) and slowly bump up against the rim so you're elevated just above it, BUT NOT ALL THE WAY ON IT. This will allow you to see and shoot things below you, yet you won't get squished. Once you've done it, it's easily repeatable, but you'll want to practice this in single-player mode first. Also, the Quake2 engine doesn't reorient entities to account for direction of travel, so you'll have to adjust your view as the car moves along. Be careful to just adjust your view, don't move your player's position in the car. The air trampoline ------------------ You can use the air trampoline to get ammo and weapons. Different positions above the air grates send you to different heights. Experiment. To get down safely, move towards one of the edges of the grate until your bounce height is low enough, then step off. The air towers -------------- One tower gets you onto the glass walkways, the other tower gets you off. Weapons ------- This map has: - 2 M3 shotguns (East and West sections) - 2 HK MP5's (North and West sections) - 1 SIG SSG 3000 sniper rifle (East section) - 1 handcannon (West section) - 1 Colt M4 (East section) - grenades and ammo scattered about in all sections If there are too few players, some duplicated weapons may not respawn. ================================================================== * Construction * Base : Grown from the finest Oregon electrons, roasted to a golden brown, and lovingly massaged by the Qoole design system. Editor(s) used : Qoole 2.50 Build Time : 271 total map revisions. See my comments below on how much of what was put into this map was eventually thrown away. Compile machine : Dual Pentium II, 300 MHz, 128 MB Compile time : qbsp3 24 seconds qvis3 69866 seconds 1335 portalclusters 5817 numportals 329 avg clusters visible 924 avg clusters hearable 302312 visdatasize compressed 448560 visdatasize qrad3 2298 seconds ================================================================ * Archeological information * This map has less than 10% of the things I'd planned for it and which I'd implemented beforehand in smaller test maps. What you see in this map is really a small fraction of what once existed. The West section used to have a Ferris Wheel and a hidden sniper's nest behind the west wall. The North and East sections were once a single section with a nice battle plain between them, and there used to be another hill in a larger area to the southeast. These things and many others had to go in order to save the map. When I began building this map the many excellent tutorials on Quake2 did not exist. As a result, I had a misconception about when the Quake2 engine would render polygons and when it wouldn't. The predecessor of this map was so large it was taking days to vis and would crash during play. I have spent a fair amount of time reducing the polygon count by most of the tricks shown in the tutorials. Unfortunately, some the things I'd done during the creation of the map couldn't be undone without throwing away months of work. I did not want to do that if I could bring the r_speeds down to reasonable levels. I believe the map is playable in software mode on faster machines and even better with the cheapest of 3D graphics cards. Advice to future mapmakers: get a graphics card, use gl_showtris 1, and read everything you can find on the web about map design. =================================================================================== * Miscellaneous information * There are no secrets or hidden areas in the map. All that kind of stuff got biffed in my efforts to bring down the r_speeds. =================================================================================== * Copyright/Permissions * This map (amuse.bsp) may be distributed freely provided this text file is included. I am not making the source available, simply because I don't think it would provide a good foundation for new additions or another map. That is, it would be better for someone to start from scratch (having learned about things such as areaportals, hint brushes, etc.) than to attempt to modify this map. Feel free to email me with your comments or questions. -Dave